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Voices from the January-February 2017 Issue
Roger Martin of Rotman School of Management, Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and HBR...
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Roger Martin of Rotman School of Management, Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and HBR Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius respectively discuss customer loyalty, the neuroscience of trust, entrepreneurship in Africa, the source of innovation, and the new, hefty magazine. For more, see the January-February 2017 issue.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you know that we have featured the current issue of Harvard Business Review magazine usually talking to the editor about the highlights and features inside. Today we’re going to dive deeper into the January / February 2017 issue of the magazine and hear more from the people behind the big management and business ideas in the issue.
Coming up on this episode, Rotman Business School professor Roger Martin will talk about his cover story with a former P&G CEO about what so many companies get wrong today about customer loyalty.
ROGER MARTIN: Humans haven’t changed and won’t anytime soon. They are driven by comfort and familiarity. If you don’t pay attention to that, you will lose.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Then we’ll feature my conversation with neuroeconomist Paul Zak about the science of trust and what businesses can do with the growing understanding of human psychology.
PAUL ZAK: I think the strongest piece of evidence that trust really matters for the bottom line is that we have found in the US that people who work in high trust organizations earn more.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We’ll also hear from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen about how entrepreneurs have managed to crack the code in consumer goods in Africa where many giant multinationals have failed.
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: If I can make it affordable and there’s a job to be done, I can make a very successful company in a nation that historically has been mired in poverty.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And topping it all off, there is an insightful bit from US comedian and television starred Jerry Seinfeld about– what else– innovation.
JERRY SEINFELD: A big part I find of a lot of innovation starts with someone saying you know what I’m really sick of? That’s where innovation begins.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But first I want to explain why this issue episode is different. It’s because the magazine itself is different. If you’ve grabbed it off a newsstand lately you’ve probably noticed the new issue is bigger and thicker. In fact, the English language edition is 172 pages long. Joining me to talk a little bit about the new design is Adi Ignatius, our editor in chief. Adi, thank you for coming in.
ADI IGNATIUS: Thank you, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This is a very heavy item.
ADI IGNATIUS: That was the sound of heaviness, wasn’t it?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Magazine here that I’m holding. That was the sound of a heavy magazine hitting the desk. Tell me a little bit about why this new redesigned magazine is so thick.
ADI IGNATIUS: Sure. Well, so we’re doing a couple of things. We’re moving from 10 issues a year in print to six. So going down to six issues we want each issue to be heftier. We want it to have more articles and more everything. More ideas.
We are declaring that we love print. The print is really important to what we do. It’s in some ways the best way to sort of tell kind of long form stories. And we know that a lot of our readers and subscribers prefer print. They love it.
So this newly designed newly configured magazine it’s hefty because it’s good paper, there are a lot of pages, there’s just a lot of stuff in it. So you see it, you feel it, you realize, wow, this is a big– this is a premium product.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What gets you excited about this magazine when you look at the new design?
ADI IGNATIUS: What do I want as an editor? I want people to go to articles that they know that they want to read about. But I also want them to go to articles that they didn’t know they wanted to read about. And that’s where design comes in. That’s where you have an opportunity to sort of tease people in. It does the trick of both being really appealing aesthetically but not by out shadowing the content. You know it’s all very complementary. So I just love the way this magazine looks and feels these days.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It seems to me like there’s more business people in there.
ADI IGNATIUS: That is very conscious. When we talk to readers consistently what they say is yes, yes, yes we love HBR, we love the big ideas. What we would like more of is sort of how to apply the idea. You know, hearing more from business people from practitioners. How do you apply that? How do I do I take this idea and actually make it happen in my company?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This magazine comes out six times a year. The big idea digital article comes out also six times a year on the months where we don’t have a new issue coming out. If it’s only happening six times a year, it’s kind of a bigger deal each time it does come out.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah I think that’s right. You do it for a lot of reasons, but the most interesting reason is because people are consuming our content differently. And while we have a very large core of our readership that is still engaging in print, more and more people are interested in the other formats that we offer. And more and more people are coming to our website, are reading articles online, are watching videos, or are listening to webinars.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Podcasts.
ADI IGNATIUS: And podcasts. So you know by decreasing frequency in a sense that creates the bandwidth for us to create all these other different, you know, and some ways complementary content forms that are very much an important part of the mix of what we do now.
We want to have the same impact with the digital big idea as we do with the way a powerful cover story can get people talking.
ADI IGNATIUS: Thank you, Adi. This has been really exciting. I’m really excited to take a closer look at the issue. And stay with us listeners because we will be hearing from some of the big voices in this new issue coming up next.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right. Thank you, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So let’s dig in and let’s start with the cover story. The title–
ROGER MARTIN: “Customer Loyalty is Overrated”.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Roger Martin. He wrote the cover article with former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley. Martin is a professor at Rotman Business School.
ROGER MARTIN: It turns out that much of what appears to be loyalty is actually habit. Customers unconsciously choose to continue to do the most familiar and comfortable thing to them. And if that’s buying your product or service, that’s a habit less than an expression of loyalty.
And this is linked to a huge misconception about competitive advantage. The nouveaux belief in that field is that companies have to perpetually adapt their products and their business models to a fast changing world of fast changing customer choice. And this view is particularly pushed aggressively by those who claim that everything is different in the new age high tech internet businesses.
But the truth is customers have very similar behaviors in those new-age businesses of sunrise industries as in sunset industries. Consumers gravitate to and stay with services for which they build a sense of comfort and familiarity. And in the internet world examples of this are Facebook, Uber, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google. I mean think about it– it is super hard for a Facebook user to break the habit of checking for Facebook updates.
Based on the understanding that it’s more about subconscious feeling of comfort and familiarity that breeds habit rather than loyalty, there are four things that we talk about in the article that we think are super important for every company in the modern economy to think about whether they’re new age or old fashioned.
So four things if they want to build what we refer to as cumulative advantage. Advantage that accumulates over time as you can create more of more of an unconscious habit in the minds of customers.
So first number one– you have to work as hard as possible to win the early popularity contest. Leading early buys you the option for cumulating your advantage and keeping your competition perpetually behind you. If customers have more experience with you, more familiarity with you, you will always be the more comfortable choice.
This is one of the implicit reasons why freemium is the most popular pricing approach on the internet. You build habit through free. You get customers to join you for free because that lowers the barriers to them trying you and then once they use you you serve them up in ways that they can use your product more intensively and pay fees for intensive use of products and added services.
The bottom line is that you can’t afford to encourage customers to wait and see try somebody else first. You want them now. So that’s one– win the early popularity contest.
Number two is design for habit. Have habit firmly in mind as you think about your offering. How can you make it as easy as possible for the customer to use? The Amazon Dash button is great. Just push the button. What could be more habitual? That will win big.
Google. Google it– you know, now it’s a verb– has meant exactly the same thing from inception. The same look, the same feel, the same keystrokes. It’s a brilliant habit creating product. This is supposedly one of the fastest moving businesses out there– internet businesses– that hasn’t changed in look and feel since inception.
So two is design for habit.
Third, innovate carefully within the brand. You have to understand that customers hate change. New and relaunch and re-platform are all scary concepts to the consumer’s subconscious.
I love Uber but I hate the latest software upgrade to Uber. I had to learn a new set of habits. I despise the new Air Canada flight. I fly Air Canada all the time. I despise the new site. It’s not that it’s a bad site. It’s just they forced me to learn new procedures and start down a new curve.
Does that mean you cannot change? No, but changing in ways that interrupt the habits least should be your goal.
So I love Netflix on this front. If you think about Netflix the change has been monumental. It started out as a service that delivered DVDs by mail to your door to now a streaming entertainment services. Huge change. Vast change. But they made sure that a lot stayed the same to coax the customer along. The offering is still the same. The entertainment you want without leaving your home. It was and still is subscription. The same name with a very consistent logo. They worked hard not to damage the cumulative advantage while making the changes that were necessary to prosper in the industry.
Fourth and finally, keep communication simple. Most ad copy is far too complex and the assumption behind it is that the ad is communicating with the viewer’s conscious mind. Think about it– how many times do you think that’s the case for you? Were you consciously carefully considering the ad content?
The biggest mistake that advertisers make is to show the competition’s product producing a disaster or the generic industry product. Oh, if you use this it produces this terrible situation. And then coming on and saying our product doesn’t do that. The actual message received by the subconscious is that your product caused the disaster. The subconscious doesn’t figure that out that somebody else that did the disaster and you’re the solution.
That is why P&G the master of comparison advertising always shows the product side by side not sequentially. The most effective ads actually show the customer doing what you want them to do.
For example, walking up to the bar and ordering a Miller Lite and then drinking the Miller Lite. The subconscious totally gets the message. Do the thing shown on the screen. That kind of simplicity actually makes for great advertising.
So those are the four rules. Win the early popularity contest. Design for habit. Innovate carefully within the brand. And keep communication simple.
Now, my hope for people reading this article is that it helps them to avoid falling prey to some really dangerous thinking that’s being popularized these days. The notion that sustainable advantage is dead. Morphing and changing is the only thing that is going to keep you alive. All of that is really dangerous thinking. Humans haven’t changed and won’t anytime soon. They are driven by comfort and familiarity. If you don’t pay attention to that, you will lose.
If, like Facebook and Google and Amazon and Netflix and Uber, you pay absolute attention to it, you will build advantage that is so sustainable that your biggest competitive threat is the anti-trust authorities.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Roger Martin the co-author of the article “Customer Loyalty is Overrated” in the January / February 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. Coming up, Clayton Christiansen on entrepreneurship in Africa and his Jobs To Be Done theory. And comedian Jerry Seinfeld on innovation.
But first my feature conversation with Paul Zak on the neuroscience of trust.
Maybe you’ve been following, as I have, the flurry of studies and surveys that show that trust around the world has declined. Trust in institutions is low and may be lower than it’s ever been, depending on which depressing survey you’ve been reading. Low trust shows up in our daily lives too. At home we might be locking our doors more often than we used to or than we even need to. And at work we might be hiding information from our bosses or from our employees. We might even wonder sometimes if it’s really safe to give an honest opinion.
At the same time though, I’m sure you can think of plenty of people you do trust. And to adapt a phrase, trust actually is all around if you know where to look. Leaders and all of us have a role to play in either shoring up trust or further eroding it.
So here to talk about how trust works and how we can foster more of it is Paul Zak. He’s the author of the HBR article “The Neuroscience of Trust” in our January/ February issue. He’s also a professor at Claremont Graduate University. Paul, thank you so much for talking with us today.
PAUL ZAK: Sure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So what’s happening in the brain when we trust someone?
PAUL ZAK: Right. Trust is fascinating because we can’t survive as social creatures without trusting some people around us. As the question was why. So my lab identified about 15 years ago a brain chemical called oxytocin that tells us that the person we’re interacting with appears to be trustworthy. And we’ve shown that oxytocin increases our sense of empathy, makes us tangibly care about someone else’s outcomes. So I think of this as the biological substrate of the golden rule. If you’re nice to me my brain will make oxytocin. It’ll motivate me to be nice to you. And that reduces the frictions that are involved in social interactions.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So when you talk about oxytocin that’s a chemical I have heard about in a few different contexts. Does it only measure trust or does it come up in other situations too?
PAUL ZAK: It looked like it measures or responds to positive social stimuli. So if I show you that I want to cooperate with you or if I look familiar or safe your brain will make oxytocin. And basically you’re trying to balance this desire to interact with new people and get the benefit of building a new relationship, a new network, with the cost of risking that that person might take advantage of you. And so oxytocin is not a zero one variable. It’s graded. So the more oxytocin I release the more motivated I am to interact with you.
So from an organizational perspective what we don’t want is lots of frictions between people in the same place at work. We really want this kind of easy flow. So trust is sort of a lubricant. A social lubricant, if you will.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So what are some of the things you’ve found that inhibit trust?
PAUL ZAK: Right. There are two primary inhibitors for oxytocin and you won’t be surprised by these. One of those is high levels of stress. So even you Sarah, who are a wonderful human being I’m sure, occasionally when you’re stressed out grump at people around you, even people you care about. So when we’re under a lot of stress then we go into survival mode and it’s just about me surviving the next 10 minutes. Not me interacting, building networks, cooperating with others.
And the second really interesting inhibitor for oxytocin is a brain chemical that is– or brain active chemical that is the most interesting chemical to half of the human population, which is testosterone. So high levels of testosterone inhibit the brain for making oxytocin. And in experiments where we give men in particular extra testosterone they become more selfish and more entitled. So who are these people? They’re the alpha males and the alpha females I should say. It says that if you’re designing a workplace where individuals want to interact effectively that you’re going to have to kind of modulate the stress levels as well as testosterone, which responds to social status and dominance.
So that’s a tough call to make. And I think we’ve been doing this as leaders intuitively for quite a while. And now we actually have science to guide us.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Does that mean that on the whole women are more trusting than men if we have lower levels of testosterone?
PAUL ZAK: Ah, this is fascinating. So we’re finding that oxytocin is a response to a social stimulus. So women actually would produce more oxytocin when they are shown trust. They’re subsequently more empathic, more generous, more trustworthy than men are. But women tend to be less trusting initially and that’s probably due to stress hormone effects. If I’m smaller, if I’m physically not quite as strong as a man, I might not want to risk too much initially. So we see this in differences in things like risk taking behaviors between men and women.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What are some of the behaviors that leaders can perform that will help enhance trust in the workplace?
PAUL ZAK: Right. So the idea here is that trust if it is an economic lubricant– and all the evidence suggests it is– that if I can build a high trust culture then I’m going to reduce these frictions of social interactions. Teams will work more effectively. And we’ve shown that they’re more productive and innovative. And so yeah there are building blocks in which you can push on as a leader to increase trust in your organization. For all of these eight factors I won’t go through them in detail but there are ways to use the science to kind of optimize the kinds of relationships we have at work with our work friends. Now this is where the neuroscience becomes really valuable.
So if I want to generate a recognition program so that as a community my people I work with are saying hey Sarah you did an amazing job on this project, that recognition should be close in time to when the project was completed. It’s more powerful when it comes from peers rather than coming from a leader. It’s more powerful when it’s tangible, when it’s personal, when it’s unexpected. So all these factors tell us how to optimize something that many business leaders are doing anyway, which is recognize people who do well. But let’s get the most bang for the buck out of this by understanding how the human brain works.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Some of the other things that you talk about are things like give people control over how they do their work. You know, let them craft their own job as much as you can, share information, build relationships, show vulnerability. Some of these also just sound like the basics of kind of good management that we all know we’re supposed to do. But so why don’t more leaders already do these things? Because in your article you make a solid case to say you know trust is low in organizations and engagement is low in organizations. So if we know we’re supposed to be doing some of these things, why don’t we do it? Why do we fail to thank our employees for their hard work and to recognize their hard work? Why do we fail to create concrete goals? Why do we fail to give people autonomy? What’s going on here?
PAUL ZAK: Yeah, I think we’re in the second phase of leadership. I think leadership management used to be thought of as an art form because it involved these humans who are so complicated. But with the great advances in neuroscience in the last 15 years, we can do a much better job at measuring culture. So that’s the first thing we do in the book that the article is based on is measure your culture. See how much stress is there and measure the building blocks that are changeable through changes in policy by leaders.
So I want to create a culture in my organization so that individuals are really engaged, they’re challenged, they’re recognized, they have a chance to grow. And when they make mistakes, which are inevitable and they at the source of innovation, that’s OK too. So if I’m empowering the people around me, if I’m trusting the people around me to execute the job as they see fit, then I’m really again I’m the coach. My employees are running the plays and I’m coaching them on how to do it more effectively.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I want to ask you about a different kind of mistake that could come up in any organization, which is a breach of trust. Either the manager has done something to betray the trust of their employee or vice versa. How can that be repaired? Because trust seems like it’s harder to gain than it is to lose.
PAUL ZAK: You’re exactly right. It takes a while to build up trust with somebody because we do it bit by bit. But one breach and that trust can jump to zero. So how do we do that? So first from the neuroscience perspective it turns out that if your brain is making oxytocin you’re more likely to forgive people who engage in a breach of trust. Why does that happen? That happens because we understand emotionally what they’re going through. So again oxytocin increases our sense of empathy. So if the person who violated my trust says, Paul, I’m sorry. I blew it. I just completely forgot about this thing. I promised you that I would have done it but I blew it and I take ownership over that.
So yeah I think it’s from a leadership perspective if you can create a high trust culture again you’re going to have more brain space to do other kinds of jobs because you’re not micromanaging people. But also it means that you still are responsible and you’ve got to– there still is a leadership program there in which you need to spend time with people, build relationships, set clear goals. Be the person who kind of bails out the team when they get into trouble. So I think all those factors tell us that it’s about creating a human centric culture.
And you know humans are imperfect but sometimes in that imperfection when they’re trusted comes this chance to do something different, to learn about how to do a process or create a product that’s better.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I know you’ve studied many different cultures and I’m wondering if there are some aspects of this– like maybe showing vulnerability– that don’t translate as well across cultures. Because maybe in some cultures that is seen as weakness. Or maybe there’s some other element here that works more in some cultures than others. And I’m just wondering how universal are these things that you found?
PAUL ZAK: It’s a great question. And again, that’s where the neuroscience comes in, right? All brains roughly work the same way in similar situations. And so yeah we have done experiments all around the world, including the book starts with me in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea setting an indigenous people who are organizing to work on a team project. So we’ve done studies in Asia. So each of these eight building blocks of trust are not going to be as important in one culture as in another or in one company as in another.
So again the first thing is measure the culture. And the second is then intervene to begin to change that culture. So in the article we go through lots of ways that companies have improved their culture by focusing on maybe the most important thing in their organization, which is the human interactions. So if the humans in your workplace are fighting with each other, competing with each other, tearing each other down, they’re not putting their heart and soul into moving the organization’s goals forward. But if they trust each other, if they care about each other, if they’re being recognized, if they have a chance to grow, a chance to manage their own work life, then it’s much more exciting. It’s much more fun. And when we need to come together and work I’m going to recognize that you have different skill sets than me. I’m going to recognize that we’re all on the same team. We’re trying to do the same thing.
So yeah I think it seems to hold universally. Again in the book and a little bit in the article we actually present US nationally representative data and the variation across trust and those building blocks that create trust across companies is enormous.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: For anyone out there who’s sort of saying to themselves this all sounds good but I don’t have the time or this doesn’t really matter in my industry, what is the payoff? How does this affect the bottom line?
PAUL ZAK: Yeah so you ask the most important question which is hey it all sounds great, I’d like to be in his happy workplace where people are really engaged, and they’re running their own lives, and they could work from Starbucks or whatever, but what’s the payoff? I think the strongest piece of evidence that trust really matters for the bottom line is that we have found in the US that people who work in high trust organizations earn more.
So the only way you could earn more money in this organization relative to every other organization given competitive labor markets is if you’re more productive. And so employees who work at companies in the highest quartile of trust in the US compared to the lowest quartile earn about $6,500 more a year on average. So they must be creating more output. And you get this really nice kind of triple bottom line win, which is high trust organizations are good for the employees, they’re good for the organizations, and it turns out it’s also good for society. We find that people who work in high trust organizations face less burnout and they’re more satisfied with their lives outside of work.
So we know this Sarah, right? You work in a place that just grinds you down, you get home you’re not a happy spouse, or a happy parent, or happy citizen. So I think there’s a really big win-win space here. But even if you just isolate the ROI to the company it’s strongly positive. And so I think by putting employees first, by building this human centric culture then work you know– although sometimes it can be a drag, can be actually pretty exciting and fun if you’re working on important things with people that you trust.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Paul thank you so much for talking about that with us today.
PAUL ZAK: Thank you.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Paul Zak. He’s the author of the HBR article “The Neuroscience of Trust” and his new book is called Trust Factor.
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: One of the most important dimensions of the theory of disruption is if I want to start a new company I need to come at the bottom and go after customers who historically didn’t have enough money or skill or access to own and use a product.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If we’re talking about disruption it must be Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. He spoke recently at an HBR event in London about applying his Jobs To Be Done theory to entrepreneurship in developing nations.
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: It needs to be a situation where they have a job to do but nobody is making a product that is so affordable that I can sell something that gets the job done. If I can make it affordable and there is a job to be done, I can make a very successful company in a nation that historically has been mired in poverty.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Christensen coauthored an article in the magazine titled “Africa’s New Generation of Innovators”.
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN: And so if I could go back and outside of Africa for just a second in the 1950s and early 60s Japan was impoverished. And a company called Toyota realized that there is a job to do. And that is in crowded urban settings you have all of these shops lining these narrow streets and it’s really hard to get stuff in and out. And so that’s the job. I make things. I can’t get distribution because I can’t physically reach them. And so Toyota said you know I bet we could put a motor on a bicycle or a wagon and deliver small amounts of things. And so they developed a vehicle that had three wheels not four. And the nice thing about three wheels is it was more mobile and did a job. And then they improved it. And then in the late 50s they added a fourth wheel. And they were Japanese who designed a truck for Japanese in Japan. And that meant that they had to hire more people to make it and distribute it and sell it and service it.
Sony did the very same thing coming into the bottom of the market with a different job to be done, which is I need to listen to somebody besides my family.
[LAUGHTER]
And how Korea became prosperous the very same way. Could this happen in Africa? Absolutely. So there’s this company– it was an Indonesian company came to Nigeria– the company is called Tolaram. And they realized that in Africa nobody makes noodles. And you know the Asian noodles that we just take for granted. And it is a very cheap source of carbohydrates. But nobody made noodles in Nigeria for Nigerians. So these guys came over, built a plant, started to make noodles. And it was so much cheaper than other sources of carbohydrates that it just started to take off.
And then they had trouble because the farmers had different types of wheat that they were making. They were inconsistent. They milled them in different ways in different parts of the country. And so they would lose their recipe. So they ended up having to buy all of the farmers and make them employees of the company.
And then they made their noodles and packaged them and then they had to put them to their distributors. And it turned out that about 20% of the volume of these noodles got lost, you know. So they end up having to buy the trucks.
And then they realized this is just a booming business. We ought to sell this in other countries nearby. But the ports were so corrupt they had to build their own port.
Now this company 15 years into it their revenues are a billion dollars. They employ 130,000 people. They pay $100 million in real taxes to the government. And this is just one industry but there’s a job to be done. Disruption makes it affordable and accessible. And we could go on.
But what I love about it is the mechanism for prosperity is there is a job to be done, nobody has made it affordable and accessible, if I do it prosperity can emerge. It’s exciting to finally frame the problem in a way that makes sense to us.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Clayton Christensen. He’s a professor at Harvard Business School and the title of his HBR article is “Africa’s New Generation of Innovators”.
Finally, let’s close out this episode with a taste of the magazine’s back page. That’s page 172 in our new hefty English edition. And it features an interview with comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld conquered 1990s television with his sitcom. Now he’s finding a new audience and adoring critics for his online talk show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. How did he come up with that?
JERRY SEINFELD: You know, it’s very important to know what you don’t like. It’s good to have an idea but a big part I find of a lot of innovation starts with someone saying you know what I’m really sick of? That that’s where innovation begins. Like for me it’s like I’m really sick of the music playing while somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands, sits down, how are you, how are you, you look great, so do you. It’s like I’m sick of that. I want to hear what’s the first funny thing this person said?
I’m also sick of people who really talking is not their thing on talk shows. But they’re there to sell their show, their product. The same thing with my TV show. Yeah that’s one of the places where I start. What am I really sick of?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well I, for one, am not sick of hearing from Jerry Seinfeld. So we’ll have the full interview with him on innovation, improving yourself, and how to know when to quit on the next episode of the HBR IdeaCast.
For now, thanks for flipping through the new issue with me. There’s much more inside I hope you like it.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.